If you are of a certain age and can recall television in black and white, it should take just a couple of slight adjustments of your memory dials to clear away the fuzz and static of time enough for you to sing along with this old ditty:
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Mr. Clean gets rid of dirt and grime
And grease in just a minute,
Mr. Clean will clean your whole house
And everything that’s in it.
Mr. Clean,
Mr. Clean,
Mr. Clean.
His completely bald, shiny head, his chiseled body rippling with Herculean muscles shown off to good advantage in tight white clothing, make him exotic enough, but the big hoop earring in his left ear bestows on him a slightly hermaphroditic air. Certainly Mr. Clean does not seem like a very mainstream, 1950s sort of guy.
But 40 years ago, in late summer 1958, Mr. Clean was un-leashed on mainstream American consumers. In a giant television campaign, buttressed by newspaper and magazine ads, he was presented as the perfect helper for harried homemakers. In the first nine months, 35 million bottles of the all-purpose liquid detergent flew off retailers’ shelves.
Maybe even more telling proof of the campaign’s success (and the product’s usefulness?) is the fact that 40 years later Mr. Clean still is readily found on store shelves.
The 1950s were a sort of golden age of marketing. This state of affairs was made possible by the aggressive use by postwar manufacturers of research and development to find new and often highly useful consumer products and by the emergence of television, honed by a very savvy advertising industry into a powerful mass-marketing tool.
“If you look at brands that have been around forever,” says France LeClerc, a professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, “probably more came out of that era (the ’50s) than from any other time in history.
“After World War II, we had television, but just a very few channels, so it meant everybody was exposed at the same time to the same advertising campaigns in a way that wasn’t possible in earlier advertising media, like radio and newspapers.”
LeClerc remembers the first Mr. Clean TV commercials well, even though she was a schoolchild then in French-speaking Montreal. There, he was known as “Monsieur Net.” The jingle was translated into French as well.
LeClerc can reel off the names of numerous other products introduced in the 1950s and still sold today: Joy, Cheer, Dove, Dial, Crest, Zest, Comet, Dash, Jif, Scope.
“These are products that were doing things no other products could do before,” LeClerc said of the flood of 1950s research and development-generated consumer goods. “Now it’s difficult for competitors to displace them unless they invent something that can do the job much better. People are loyal to old brand names that they feel are reliable.”
In the mid-1950s, a small company in Massachusetts, advertising solely on television, had begun making millions selling something no other company had thought to market, a liquid all-purpose detergent. It was called Lestoil. Seeing money to be made, the giant soap companies like Lever Brothers, Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble set researchers to work developing “me too” products to compete with Lestoil.
By 1957, Procter & Gamble, the giant, Cincinnati-based manufacturer of household and personal care products, showed up at the Chicago headquarters of Tatham-Laird, a medium-sized advertising agency, with its liquid cleaner.
“It didn’t even have a name yet,” says Tom Cadden, then Tatham-Laird’s television and radio group creative director. “They wanted us to come up with one.”
Cadden, 74, wrote the music and words for the Mr. Clean jingle, and his co-workers were so dubious about it, he feared it wasn’t going to be used in the ad campaign.
A memorable jingle
Now retired, Cadden has the appearance of a sort of mellowed-out, suburbanized Spike Jones. He clearly regards his Mr. Clean jingle as the high water mark of a long career in the ad business. A montage of Mr. Clean advertisements hangs in his Glenview living room, and a home recording studio, where he composes and records music as a hobby, is liberally sprinkled with Mr. Clean memorabilia.
Coast-to-coast network television presented advertisers with a bold new way of reaching mass audiences in the 1950s, but, because buying time from the networks was so expensive, it also raised the stakes of advertising considerably. When his agency took on the Mr. Clean account, Cadden said, both Tatham-Laird and Procter & Gamble did considerable market research before committing a lot of money on packaging the product and advertising it.
An arm of economics that was born in the 1920s, market research initially was used by manufacturers simply to find out how people used their products and what they thought of them. By the ’50s, it was a much more highly evolved discipline, expanded to find areas of consumer needs where there was no product to satisfy them (inspiring the invention of disposable diapers, for example, and fabric softeners that eliminate static cling).
Market research had also developed tools by then that could tell manufacturers and admen what to say in their ads and where to place them to find audiences most likely to buy their products.
Playing the name game
To that end, Tatham & Laird came up with a list of possible names for Procter & Gamble’s new liquid cleaner, Mr. Clean among them, and asked groups of consumers which was most appealing.
“You call them focus groups now,” Cadden said, “but I called them consumer panels then. The name that easily won turned out not to be Mr. Clean. It came in second. The winner was `Town Talk.’ “
How such an unwieldy name as Town Talk even got on the list has escaped Cadden’s memory, though he believes his fellow admen were toying with an ad campaign based on the household cleaner being the “talk of the town.”
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Tatham-Laird executives vetoed Town Talk and chose Mr. Clean, a name which led to creation of a character whose genesis nobody now can remember.
“Initially,” Cadden said, “the character was a guy in a sailor suit, and they were playing around with some mock-ups with slogans like, `Get your house battleship clean.’ “
Eventually the idea was refined to resemble the now-familiar bald-headed character whose appearance has changed only slightly over the last 40 years.
“He was supposed to be a has-been adventurer,” Cadden said, “a good guy who had been everywhere, seen everything and was all-time cleaning champ. When we asked people after the ads came out, an awful lot of them didn’t realize he was supposed to be a sailor. They thought he was some kind of genie.
“The whole idea was that he was the housewife’s helper, taking on her toughest cleaning chores. Where his `look’ came from, I don’t remember. A lot of people thought he looked like Eisenhower, others said Daddy Warbucks (from the Orphan Annie comic) or Yul Brynner.”
A persona such as Mr. Clean, created to stand both as the name and the symbol for a product, is called in advertising a mnemonic device, something to aid people’s memories. In this case, the picture and the name Mr. Clean are supposed to get consumers to think of the character and the product simultaneously, triggering them to think of Mr. Clean when they decide to mop floors.
The idea wasn’t exactly unique. Lever Brothers and Colgate-Palmolive, arch rivals of Procter & Gamble, used mnemonic devices too, when they came out with their own liquid cleaners around the time Mr. Clean was introduced. Lever Brother’s “Handy Andy” was a cartoon figure with four arms and dressed as a janitor, while Colgate-Palmolive’s “Genie,” was a female genie.
All three products sold well initially, but Mr. Clean did the best. The difference may well have been Cadden’s own, nearly rejected input into the advertising campaign.
“I’m musically inclined,” he said. “Every time we started looking at new products, my first ideas always flashed to doing a jingle on it, and that’s what happened here. Nobody told me to work on that idea, I just went home to Skokie and worked on it at night, then sang it into a tape recorder.”
When he first played it for his Tatham-Laird colleagues, Cadden says, he didn’t find much enthusiasm for the jingle. Procter & Gamble loved it, however, and singer Don Cherry was hired to sing it for the commercials. The 60-second commercials were test-marketed in Pittsburgh.
“We did a `day-after recall’ sort of test,” said Cadden, “calling people on the phone, asking them what commercials they remembered viewing the night before on television. It (Mr. Clean) had very good immediate results.”
On Aug. 11, 1958, the television ads rolled out across the country, as did print ads. The jingle seemed to stick in everybody’s mind. In fact, after audiences repeatedly requested that his band play “Mr. Clean,” East Coast society orchestra leader Lester Lanin in 1961 recorded an album of advertising-inspired music, “The Madison Avenue Beat.”
A name for an era
“It occurs to me that the advertising for Mr. Clean was just perfect for that period of time,” said Mary Ann McGrath, marketing professor at Loyola University.
“America had moved to the suburbs, and young wives were left isolated at home, often far from their mothers, mothers-in-law and siblings, faced with running a house with no help or advice. Mr. Clean, this exotic, non-threatening eunuch sort of character who was strong could help them.
“As a name, Mr. Clean gave people a good idea of what the product does, especially since it was a chemical cleaning agent that, at some level, is not easy to understand in terms of why it works. The cartoon figure is a nice way to anthropomorphize the product, like some other product figures Americans love so much, like the Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy.
“I doubt if they were doing the ads for the first time today they would choose a big strong man to represent the cleaning fluid. With so many of us in the work force now, what women really want at home doing the house work is their own housewife.”